Ex-Defense secretary Robert McNamara dies at 93

WASHINGTON -- Robert McNamara had excelled at everything: Eagle Scout, young Harvard professor, corporate "whiz kid" at Ford. As one of the longest-serving and most influential Defense secretaries, however, he found himself consumed by the Vietnam War and eventually vilified as its architect.

At age 93 and in failing health, he died at 5:30 a.m. Monday at his home here, his wife, Diana, told the Associated Press.

He was second only to Donald Rumsfeld as the longest-serving Defense secretary, and for 13 years afterward, he served as president of the World Bank.

"In Vietnam, he was the architect of one of America's greatest tragedies," says Richard Immerman, a historian at Temple University in Philadelphia and a former intelligence official in the George W. Bush administration. "He will always be associated with the futile effort to apply 'systems analyses' to human behavior."

McNamara was famous for his devotion to qualitative analysis and his efforts to impose business practices on the sprawling Pentagon. He was easy to caricature with his trademark rimless glasses and dark, slicked-back hair.

He became "a tortured man" for his role in Vietnam, says defense analyst Loren Thompson, who studied McNamara's record for his doctoral dissertation at Georgetown University. Critics including anti-war Sen. Wayne Morse, D-Ore., dubbed the Vietnam conflict "McNamara's War."

In a best-selling memoir published in 1995, McNamara wrote that he had misgivings about the Vietnam conflict as early as 1967, though he continued to prosecute the war even as U.S. and Vietnamese casualties mounted.

The mea culpa chronicled in In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam was hammered as too little, too late by anti-war activists and editorial writers, including in a scathing editorial in The New York Times.

He lived quietly in Washington for decades, maintaining a downtown office as recently as 2006 and keeping a listed home telephone number. He got on the phone when a USA TODAY reporter called in 2006 for a story written when Rumsfeld, the architect of an unpopular war in Iraq, was about to surpass him as the nation's longest-serving Pentagon chief.